Electronic device manufacturers strive to produce a rich interface for users. Conventional devices use visual and auditory cues to provide feedback to a user. In some interface devices, kinesthetic feedback, such as active and resistive force feedback, and/or tactile feedback, such as vibration, texture, and heat, is also provided to the user, more generally known collectively as “haptic feedback” or “haptic effects”. Haptic feedback can provide cues that enhance and simplify the user interface. Specifically, vibration effects, or vibrotactile haptic effects, may be useful in providing cues to users of electronic devices to alert the user to specific events, or provide realistic feedback to create greater sensory immersion within a simulated or virtual environment.
A haptic effect developer can author a haptic effect for the device, and the device can be configured to output the haptic effect. In this scenario, different types of hardware can be capable of generating different types of haptic effects due to different hardware characteristics. For example, different types of actuators, such as eccentric rotating mass motor actuators, linear resonant actuators, and piezoelectric actuators, are capable of generating different types of haptic effects due to different electromechanical characteristics of the different actuators. In general, a haptic effect developer that wishes to author a haptic effect for a specific type of hardware is required to tailor the haptic effect for the specific hardware. If the haptic effect developer wishes to support multiple hardware types, the haptic effect developer generally has to author different haptic effects, in order to provide an optimal haptic experience for each hardware type. This can result in additional design time and effort involved with authoring haptic effects.